Really, it's rather an unremarkable field. Signs warn you not to step off the path, for fear of being spiked by prickly pears, but to all intents and purposes it's just a grassy patch with a few granite-markers in the middle.

To get there you have to drive past a strip of low-rise shopping malls, fast-food joints and garages. You park your car, pay your $5 and then, having wandered past two ramshackle sheds, you arrive at a point marked by a boulder, where perhaps the most life-affecting event of the past 100 years took place.

On December 14, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright - bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio - tossed a coin on the sandbank at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Both men were dressed smartly in suits and ties. Wilbur won the toss. Attempting to achieve man's first successful powered flight, he edged the plane forward. It rose, but way too steeply and immediately dived to the ground. The damage took three days to repair.

On December 17, the brothers tried again, this time with Orville at the controls. At 10.35am that day, the plane's propellers were started and it moved forward down the narrow track. With Wilbur running alongside to the right, the flimsy craft left the ground at a speed of 8mph, and 12 seconds later touched down 120ft away. It flew three more times before the end of the afternoon, the last attempt achieving 852ft in just under a minute. The Wright brothers didn't want to crow about what they'd done, but word got out and before long, the whole world knew about their flights that day at Kill Devil Hills.

In many ways, the state of North Carolina has similar, modest characteristics. Ask most British people to tell you about it, and you'd probably have better luck with the "name five famous Belgians" game. With a population of about eight million, located halfway down the US eastern seaboard roughly equidistant to New York and Miami, it's a quiet, decidedly unfancy kind of place. You can get to the state capital, Raleigh, nonstop in eight hours from London. Descending through the clouds on final approach, first impressions are that it's spacious, green and wooded. All houses seem to have large gardens, front and back, while highways cut through parkland and acres of trees. On the ground, it has a prosperous, somewhat sleepy air. It's home to major research and pharmaceutical companies, and the area has three prestigious universities. For a tourist, it's a good place to spend a first night, getting over jetlag, before exploring the neo-colonial state capitol building and the three museums of history, natural sciences and art.

However, the highest priority on your list should be eating breakfast at Big Ed's restaurant in Raleigh's City Market district: mountains of eggs, biscuits, grits, red-eye gravy, sausage, bacon, ham, hotcakes and omelettes, all washed down with jugs of sweet tea (that's the iced variety).

A two and a half-hour drive south-east of Raleigh along highway 40 brings you to Wilmington, near the coast and not far from the South Carolina border. The battleship USS North Carolina is moored across the Cape Fear river, and there are some old colonial-style mansions to explore. Other than those attractions, Wilmington is just a place where you mooch, you wander, you hang out, you chill - rather the like the cast of the TV series Dawson's Creek, which is filmed in the town. In the historic downtown area, there are plenty of quaint shops along Front Street, and lots of bars and restaurants on Water Street.

Moving north, the coast is dotted with small islands known as the Outer Banks. It was on these islands that the pirate Blackbeard had his hideout - the wreck of his boat, the Queen Anne's Revenge, is believed to lie just offshore. Today, this area is a mixture of quaint, small towns (exemplified by Beaufort, with old B&Bs, historic civil-war era houses, an impressive maritime museum and the nearby tranquillity of Cape Lookout), and brasher resorts such as Atlantic Beach, where middle America comes to relax on the sand each summer.

However, the latter's urban sprawl, and that further south in places such as Topsail Island, is a bit Jekyll and Hyde. In parts, much of the coast is lined with houses, many of them on stilts, restaurants and "bucket and spade" shops, which you would think would make for a rather tacky time. But if you actually stop your car, get out and clamber over the sandbanks, you are presented with some of the most pristine, gorgeous beaches you'll ever see, and all the build-up seems a million miles away. And if you want to venture on to the water, the area is renowned throughout America for its top-class wreck-diving, surfing and fishing.

An hour's drive north of Beaufort, the road peters out and, if you want to avoid a long diversion inland to the northern Outer Banks, you have to take a ferry across the expanse of Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke Island. The vessel, which accommodates up to 50 cars, takes two hours and 15 minutes to complete the journey. On my crossing, people just sat and read, or stared out over the grey water. No one talked or wanted to chat - very unusual, I thought, compared with the extremely gregarious Carolinians I'd met previously.

Only a quarter of an hour after we left, land was out of sight, seagulls trailed in our wake, cormorants and pelicans bobbed up and down next to us while the occasional small fishing boat, passed by its nets draped over the side. A woman sat near me dipping in and out of a magazine article entitled "Prayer - does it matter?" Others just stayed in their cars, seats reclined, snoozing. Two crew members chatted about a work colleague. (The local accent is supposed to derive from Elizabethan English - the first English colonists settled on Roanoke, another Outer Bank island just north of here in the 1580s.)

I'd wanted to explore Ocracoke, which in summer is a popular spot for vacationing families, but the light was fading quickly and I had another ferry to catch and then quite a drive after that. I sped along highway 12, with sandbanks to my right again hiding swathes of empty beach, and just made the ferry for the 40-minute journey to the next island, Hatteras. I'd wanted to visit this area, too - a place of wildfowl and marshes - but by now it was pitch black and so I carried on in my car for another hour until I arrived in the small town of Manteo, near Kitty Hawk.

The following morning, I was at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, admiring their achievement under blustery skies. In some ways, it's hard to picture the scene that day, 99 years ago, because flying is something we take for granted today. I had come 4,000 miles in eight hours from Gatwick, sipping bloody marys, eating pizza in row 47 and watching Matt Damon on my seat-back TV screen. How easy it all seemed, how everyday.

The fact that getting off the ground is no easy matter was brought back to me that afternoon. Five minutes down the road, Kitty Hawk Kites can teach a complete novice to hang-glide in an afternoon - well, that's the theory. I was nervous as thoughts of jumping off 800ft cliffs went through my mind, but here you achieve heights of just 15ft after launching from the sandbanks. I quizzed my guides, Andy and Dan, on how I should safely bring the glider down if I soared unexpectedly into the air. Andy raised an eyebrow, in a way that suggested my chances of soaring anywhere were somewhere between slim and nil.

And he was right. The wind dropped and an eerie calm descended over the sandbanks. We ran downhill as if our lives depended on it, trying to pick up lift, but gravity was having the last laugh and we stayed glued to the ground. Andy and Dan said it wasn't going to happen so we packed up and walked back over the dunes.

Perhaps it had been much the same for the Wright brothers. Dejected on so many occasions, they must have felt like giving up, until that day in December 1903 when they took off and conquered gravity for 12 brief seconds. I suppose, theirs was a very remarkable field after all.

Kitty Hawk Kites (kittyhawk.com) charge $85 for a three-hour learn to hang-glide lesson. In 2003, there will be many state-wide celebrations of the Wright Brother's first flight. The North Carolina Museum of History (ncmuseumofhistory.org) in Raleigh, and the city's Art Museum (ncartmuseum.org) are both putting on major exhibitions.